The Woods Are Lonely, Dark and Deep
by BlueIris08
Summary: A psychic encounter, fear, and a lot of angst.


**Characters**: Sam and Dean. Genfic.**  
Word Count**: 8000**  
Summary**: A psychic encounter, fear, and a lot of angst. Sam POV.**  
Author's note**s: This 'verse is set in an off-canon Season Two, and incorporates none of the events from "Devil's Trap" onward. The story continues from Dean's POV in "Promises to Keep," which is then followed by "Miles to Go."**  
Further notes:** All my fic can be found on my lj, linked through my profile page. I tweak my stories continually, so I actually recommend that people read the fic at the lj instead of here.

* * *

_Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, Wisconsin_  
_October 10, 2006_

"It's okay, sweetheart," the man crooned. "We won't hurt you."

She shrank back against the tree with a little gasp of terror when he took a step closer. The man was being nice now, but he had _yelled_ in a scary deep voice and tried to grab for her when she'd slipped out of the woods.

"My name is Dean, and this is my brother Sammy, okay? You don't need to be afraid of us." She whimpered and hid her face against her knees, but when she looked up again, the stranger was still there. "Are you lost?"

She nodded, cowering back as he sat down on the grass in front of her. He just looked at her with kind, gentle eyes, not at all like Daddy's, and waited for her to speak.

"Scared," she whispered.

The man named Dean's face got all tight. "I know," he said, and his voice was even deeper than Daddy's, but softer. "I know you are, honey, but we're going to help you. Tell me what happened, all right?"

Trembling and twisting her fingers in the worn fabric of one of her sleeves, she tried to tell him, but something pushed at her.

"Dean!" she gasped, and then burst into fresh tears, because her voice sounded funny and that wasn't what she'd meant to say.

"Sammy," he said, his face still tight, like Mommy's had been when she put cold cloths on her bruises. "Just wait a minute. It's okay."

He reached for her again, carefully, but she cringed away with a little scream. She shouldn't have come out, she should have stayed hidden away...

"Can you tell us your name?"

She shook her head and twisted her fingers in her sleeve again. Another stranger was coming. She covered up her mouth because she couldn't stop crying and curled up as small as she could, trying to make herself invisible.

The man looked over his shoulder, then back at her. "Stay here, honey, it's all right," he coaxed. "Just wait a little, Sammy…please, sweetheart, stay here."

But the man named Dean was afraid of the stranger too, so she ran and hid back in the trees, hoping they'd all go away.

* * *

Sam knew three things for certain: he was lost, he wasn't asleep, and he was scared as hell. He clawed at the thickets standing between him and daylight to no avail; he tried to follow the garbled snatches of Dean's voice filtering through the brambles but couldn't pinpoint its source. He kept searching anyway, afraid that if he stopped or turned around, skeletal branches would reach out to snag his clothes, catch in his hair, and drag him into the dark woods behind him.

He kept following Dean's indistinct words until he ran up against an impossibly large, lightning-blasted oak. It was still standing, but split by a gaping crack wide enough for him to squeeze through. He hoped.

"Dean!" he shouted, shoving his way into the split. He couldn't make it through...no, something was blocking him.

"Sammy…," he heard, "…wait…" Damned if Sam knew what he was supposed to be waiting for, but there was no way Dean could want him to stay here, where the trees could pull him down into some nameless, maddening fear. He tried to circle around the trunk and came up short against more brambles. Something ghosted through them—the first motion he'd seen since he woke up. It should have scared him half to death, but he was already there.

"My brother…officer...give him some space...," Dean was saying as he tried to climb through the split again.

The shadows still curled around him and didn't want to let him go, but he struggled his way through the tree's rotted core, into the light on the other side. A strange snap jerked him back where he'd been before he woke up in the forest: the picnic area where they'd stopped for a break. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around his legs, and head tucked down. He was shaking from head to toe, his head was spinning, and he had no memory of getting from the forest to there.

"Sir...not drugs," Sam heard. His mind was weirdly fractured: not an unfamiliar sensation, but more intense than ever before. Dean was echoing in the cracks, all sharp anxiety and a somehow off-kilter protectiveness, and so was another, unfamiliar presence.

"He's schizophrenic," Dean was pleading, "he has episodes sometimes. I just need to let the worst of it pass so I can take him home."

He snapped his head up with fresh terror to see the park officer Dean was talking to looking at him. Kindness and compassion showed on the man's face, but when Sam met his eyes, he felt pity and a vague fear of contagion. No, he had to be imagining it, because Dean was keeping the man way out of range. Hell, Dean was out of range too, even for Dean.

Choking back panic and nausea, he ducked his head back down. His cheeks were wet—fuck, his _knees_ were damp with tears he didn't remember crying. That he hadn't cried, out there in the woods.

The other man withdrew, and Dean was back. "He's gone, sweetheart, look at me, okay?" his brother asked in a tone that he hadn't heard in...well, had never heard, because the last time he'd needed to be soothed like that was before Dean's voice changed.

"Gimme a minute," he grunted.

"Sammy?" Dean backed up a little bit. "Is that you?"

His tone changed a little, but it wasn't the one he used for normal questions like, _'Sammy, can you breathe?'_, and the question itself was confirmation enough. Sam nodded, keeping his head tucked down against the bout of lightheadedness that, along with the bizarre empathic experiences, had begun following the psychic attacks--what he had thought were psychic attacks. Sam dug his nails into his palm in a futile effort to block out the rising terror. It would explain so much, he thought, but God, not _that_.

"You okay, dude? Getting dizzy?" Dean asked. When Sam nodded without lifting his head, his brother added gently, "Sammy, I need you to look at me now."

_Bite the bullet, Sam. Take it like a man, and a Winchester_. It took every shred of his will, but Sam met his brother's eyes.

"I'm schizophrenic?" he whispered.

"No! God, Sam, no." Dean lurched forward and stopped when Sam flinched. "You were having an ESP thing. He thought you were tripping."

"Jesus. Are you sure? It wasn't a vision—it was outside my head, and everything's too jagged now. Worse than usual." When Dean arched a baffled eyebrow Sam repeated, "Are you sure?" Because when you might be psychotic, that sort of thing is worth double-checking.

"I'm sure," Dean told him firmly.

Dean's 'aura'—Sam always thought psychic terms in quotation marks, hoping for the day he could find synonyms that didn't call to mind love beads and flower power—was way too sharp and defined. Even at a distance, he could feel subtle variations in Dean's 'energies' that he'd never been able to distinguish before: concern about Sam, an urgency he was trying to suppress, and then some indefinable other worry. But it didn't have whatever an 'I'm lying to my brother about being crazy' vibe would feel like. Relief hit Sam with the same force the panic had, running unchecked through all the open spaces in his head. A giddy, almost hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up, and he jammed his hand against his mouth to keep it in.

"Sammy!" Dean lunged forward again like he was expecting Sam to go somewhere.

Sam held up a warning hand. He didn't have enough control during the empathic fits to block Dean's emotions out, and kept him at arm's length until they passed because it was the only way to respect his privacy. Also, because Dean in his head was a whole lot of Dean. Sam loved his brother, but it was possibly more Dean than any one person needed.

"I can still feel you," Sam told him. "And I felt that cop. No way should I have been able to feel that cop." He pushed the heels of his hands against his temples, as if he could shove the misaligned pieces inside back into place. "And it wasn't a dream or a vision—I was there." A lingering flicker of fear suddenly expanded through his head like the relief had done, echoing and swelling instead of dissipating. Sam folded himself over again, trying not to hyperventilate. "Dean," he choked out, "this one is really fucking me up."

"You'll be all right, Sammy," Dean told him, in the tone that Sam couldn't help but believe. "I'm coming closer, okay?" Without waiting for permission, he moved up to Sam's side. Sam felt him reaching out before he made contact, like a psychic infrared camera picking up a halo of body heat. "It's okay, man. It'll pass."

Sam nodded and tried to ground himself by focusing on his own breathing instead of Dean's hand rubbing in steady circles between his shoulder blades. When he was reeling and disoriented from a mental assault, it was hard not to ride it out by clinging to the solid presence that was the only source of unwavering support and love Sam had ever known. It was a slippery slope from relying on his older brother's assistance to needing his childhood caretaker's comfort, and at the bottom of that slope lay dependency. Sam wasn't going there.

"Okay," he said once his breathing was under control. "I'm good."

The fear was gone. Maybe the jagged pieces in his head had fit back together enough to dam up his emotions before every random feeling gushed out of control, or maybe it was just Sam's irrational but enduring conviction that while he got beaten, slashed, strangled, and occasionally mauled as an occupational hazard, nothing would actually _happen_ to him if Dean was around.

And, ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved dependency.

"What?" Dean asked, leaving Sam to wonder what he'd said out loud.

"Just—just don't kiss me on the forehead and tell me you love me, okay?"

A beat passed before Dean said easily, "Dude. After three straight days in the car, I can barely stand to look at you." He shifted his hand as Sam sat up and guided him to lean against the tree trunk behind him. "You want to tell me what happened?"

"It feels like you think you already know," Sam pointed out, because uncontrollable rambling was another joy that had come along with the expansion of his—whatever they were. Sam refused to think of them as 'powers' because he had as much power over psychic forces as a sluice gate has over water, and he'd call them 'abilities' when he was able to do something with them. Preferably, shut them off.

"Don't _do_ that, Sammy," Dean said without heat. It was his fault for coming too close, and he knew it.

"Do you think I would if I could help it?" Sam griped as he settled back. The dizziness was lessening, and the feeling of dislocation was finally fading out. He wasn't back to normal, but he was close enough to fake it.

"Look, I don't know, but I'm working a theory." Dean let go of his shoulder. "Tell me what happened."

Sam reluctantly closed his eyes and tried to pull the puzzle pieces of the not-vision out of the jumble in his head. "I never got lost when I was little, did I?" he asked slowly, wrinkling his brow in concentration as he sorted them through. "Really lost, in the woods or something. The thing in Minnesota doesn't count."

"It should damn well count for something, with the scar I got out of it," Dean remarked. "Eyes open."

Sam complied. No spinning or blurring. _Disorientation gone_, he checked off in the back of his mind. "I wasn't little, and that was getting abducted, not lost," he said out loud. "And, sorry."

"S'okay," Dean said absently, searching his eyes for God knew what. "Let's see. Ghosts, spirits, and beasties would come from three states over to eat, suck the life-force from, otherwise consume, or _abduct_ the larval psychic Sammy…"

"Not funny," Sam groused. "And are you an optometrist now?" _Lightheadedness gone_, he noted.

"For a minute, I thought you were getting as handsome as me. Trick of the light." Dean backed off and handed him a water bottle. "Believe it or not, the only time you got lost was in the mall when you were six. Which was bad enough, had me and Dad splitting up and doing a store-to-store sweep of the place looking for you. Little shit, wandering off like that."

"All six-year-olds get lost in the mall. It's a universal constant," Sam defended himself automatically. He took a drink and dampened a handkerchief to rub the itchy salt trails from his face. _Empathy gone_—that was the final checkbox.

"So you were in the woods?" Dean prompted.

"Yeah." Sam set down the water bottle. "I dozed off, a nightmare started, and then it just stopped." Dean would know what he meant: 'nightmare' indicated 'premonition' in the Winchester lexicon, while 'dream' meant 'nightmare.' They'd never needed a word for 'good dream.' "I woke up in the forest, scared as hell. _Woke_ up, not dreamed it," he emphasized.

Dean glanced at the utterly innocuous woods, then back to Sam. "Okay. Keep going."

Sam spread his hands, deeply aware of how much the next part would sound like he'd eaten too many chili peppers and read _Alice in Wonderland_ before settling in for a nap. "Um, I followed your voice to this giant split tree. It took me a couple tries to get through it, something yanked me, and then I was here." Sam didn't say anything more about the fragmented, dissociative sensations—he was working his own theory on that, and there was no point in bringing it up until he knew more.

If Dean also thought Sam's story called March hares and mad hatters to mind, he didn't mention it. "Did you call me?"

"Yeah, actually, when I couldn't get through. Sounded like you told me to wait." He waited for confirmation; to his relief, Dean nodded. "So, what's your theory?"

Carefully, Dean said, "I think you were doing some kind of trance channeling."

"Channeling," Sam repeated.

"Yeah. Somebody around here was talking through you."

"Oh, that's just fucking _great_," Sam said bitterly. "Jesus, what's it going to be next? What's even _left_?" He knocked his head back against the tree and groaned as it stirred up a final ripple of dizziness.

"You haven't done telepathy," Dean offered helpfully.

"Rhetorical question." Sam sighed. Dean would probably call it a pissy sigh, but Sam figured he had the right to be pissy when crap like this happened. "Let's get out of here."

Dean stayed put. "You need to do it again, Sam."

"The hell I do. If it's important, they'll call back." Once he'd dropped from exhaustion, because he wasn't going to sleep as long as he could help it. "Look, it was a bad place, okay? I'm not going looking for it."

"Nothing's going to happen to you," Dean soothed. "It wasn't you being scared."

"The hell it wasn't. C'mon, man, what are the odds that there's a psychic around here?" Sam was still irrationally but emphatically refusing to accept the truth that would be conveyed by saying 'another psychic.' He had psychic events, yes, but that's all there was to it.

"You switched places with a little girl out in the woods." Impatience was pushing out comfort in Dean's voice. "She was trying to tell me where she was, but the cop scared her off."

"Okay, what are the odds that there's a psychic little girl with a fear of cops doing some 'Freaky Friday' thing in these woods? Even lower." Disturbingly, though, in their world it could happen.

"Listen to me." Dean's urgency cut through Sam's annoyance. "Don't you get it? She's lost. Out there."

That shut Sam up. Dean kept going anyway.

"C'mon, Sam, think about it. This park is the size of Rhode Island," he said, waving his arm toward the land reserve stretching out in front of them. "God knows how many picnic spots and hiking trails. How hard is it to believe a kid wandered off a path somewhere in it?"

Not that hard, and the kid didn't need to be psychic. The scope of Sam's visions had expanded beyond glimpses of fellow members of the community of the supernaturally cursed—he'd find a less cumbersome description eventually—maybe they were also mutating into some godawful form involving audience participation. Or it could be channeling, but either way Dean was right: it was entirely possible that there was a kid lost in the forest, or about to be.

"Okay," he said. Plausibility became irrelevant in the face of Dean's conviction anyway. "But I don't know what to do. It's not like I've ever had any control over it."

"I dunno. Think of some psychic thing. Anything." Dean looked at Sam as if he expected him to get a blanket and pillow out of the car and curl up for a nap on a picnic table. "She's really scared, Sam."

"I'll give it a shot. And it might not have happened yet," Sam reminded him as he tried to get comfortable against the rough bark at his back and closed his eyes. Needing no sixth sense—Sam was willing to think that term without qualifying mental punctuation marks—to know what Dean was doing, he warned, "Stop staring at me."

He started with the obvious: imagining a room in whatever part of his brain housed his 'freaky psychic shit,' as Dean put it, and that was a better term than anything Sam could come up with. It appeared easily, too easily for his comfort. Sam hissed out a startled, dismayed breath when the walls came into focus.

Well. Dean's theory hadn't been confirmed yet, but his had.

"What is it?"

"A room. Hold on," he said, concentrating harder. Some mental lens shifted, and he was standing inside the room, not visualizing it. He ran his fingers over the uneven texture of the surface in front of him. "Um, I'm not pawing at the tree bark or anything, right?"

"Huh? You're just sitting here." Catching on, Dean clarified, "Whatever you're doing is all in your head."

"I'm touching the wall." At least the cop wouldn't see him performing some bizarre pantomime if he came back, but Sam would have preferred the bark answer. He imagined a door forming, and it appeared with the same disconcerting readiness as the room itself.

"Got a door. It's closed," he told Dean. _No one there, let's go_, he wanted to say.

"Open it," Dean urged, like Sam wouldn't have thought of that himself.

"Dude. Don't help." He put his hand on the doorknob, which was as solid as the walls and door itself. "No, on second thought, grab my hand. I don't know what's on the other side."

"Got your left wrist," Dean said as Sam felt his fingers close around his forearm. It wasn't a physical sensation, but it was palpable, and not for the first time, Sam decided it was easiest not to think about how the whole thing worked.

"Okay, here goes," he said, and turned the knob. Cold air rushed in at the first crack. Sam gritted his teeth against his trepidation, and pulled the door wide.

He yelped and jumped backward. She was _right there_, in the shadows just past where the light from the room spilled out.

"Sam?" Dean asked, anxious and a little too loud.

The child squeaked in fear and scuttled into the shadows out of Sam's line of sight. Keeping one part of his mind fixed on Dean's anchoring hold, he stepped forward until he could see further out. They were in the thickest part of the forest, where even the half-bare branches were dense enough to block out the autumn sun. Fallen, rotted leaves littered the ground, and the cold air was musty with decay.

The stark white of the little girl's face flashed in the darkness as she peeked out from behind the nearest tree. Her face was smudged and tear-tracked, a broken twig had caught in a snarl of her tangled hair, and God, she was so small and so scared. Sam knelt down until he was sitting back on his heels and stretched his hand out. She stepped into view again, and his heart constricted when he saw her torn, muddy clothing.

"C'mon, sweetie," he coaxed, urging her forward so that she could see into the room where it was warm and safe, and where Dean wouldn't let anything happen to them.

She shook her head.

"Sam?" Dean called again.

She jumped back. She wasn't sure about Dean, with his hard grasp and his big booming voice. Dean, who tightened his hold on Sam's arm when he tried to tug it away.

"She won't come if you're holding on to me." Sam said. "It's okay. Let go." Dean released him, and Sam could sense him sliding back a few feet. "And you'd better whisper," he added.

He screwed up his courage and scooted forward onto the doorsill marking the boundary between his space and the little girl's. She inched forward and looked up at his face, deciding if she was more afraid of him or the woods. When she reached out, a rip in her blouse revealed bruises where someone had gripped her forearm hard and twisted; Sam had an idea that there would be other marks on her body, inflicted by someone who knew to strike where bruises wouldn't show.

"That's it. That's my brave girl," he said.

She blinked at him as if praise was a foreign language, but in a burst of daring, she put her slender, filthy hand into his. Her skin was freezing, and if Sam had thought the shadows were frightening, they were nothing like what she carried inside. She let him gently tug her forward to the very edge of the threshold, but there she balked—she'd reached the limits of her courage.

"It's okay, it's okay, I promise," he told her. He tucked a few bedraggled strands of hair behind her ear and ran his thumb along her delicate cheekbone. His hand looked dark and huge as he cupped her face. "I'm going to show you something, all right?"

When she nodded, he reached back into his memory to that time when he had been lost too. She cringed back once and looked at him with wide, disbelieving eyes as he showed her how he went from scared to safe, but she let him soothe her and carry the memory through to the end.

"That's my big brother," he said, gesturing through the doorway. "He'll take care of you too."

After a solemn consideration, she let him draw her across the doorsill. But it turned out that there was only room for one of them, so Sam picked her up—she squeaked again—and lifted her in with a weird wrench as he stepped out to where she had been.

Water rushing over rocks sounded close by, but at first, all he could see was trees. To the eye it was an ordinary forest, but the psychic imprint of her fear permeated every bit of it. It had sunk into the soil like water; the trees had drawn it up through their roots and spread it through the latticework of branches overhead. Fright had nourished the leaves that lay dead and rotting on the ground, so that they would feed the new shoots that would appear when spring came. Sam picked his way over the rocky ground until he found the small river. It ran white and fast, and the force that etched it into the shale bedrock was terror.

He inched toward it, approaching it as cautiously as the child had approached his room. Low, rocky crags rose up on either side of him. They were probably riddled with overhangs and shallow caves where a small girl could hide, but he couldn't go farther without losing the path that would take him back. He wouldn't be able to sense her anyway—she was safe with Dean, while he was alone in her place.

Except…he wasn't, not quite. This place was hers alone, but he could sense other spaces around him, spiraling outward like a nautilus's chambers. There were other presences in those places, one or two of them stirring as if they'd sensed him too.

Sam stumbled back to the door, noticing that his heart wasn't pounding.

Dean's rumbling low voice and the girl's whispering one filtered through the door. Sam huddled in the sliver of light falling over the threshold to wait, and God help him for wishing a child in his place, but he couldn't switch back soon enough. Eventually—he had no idea how long—she reappeared. He knelt down at the doorsill and held out his arms to her. She went mute again, but walked up to him without quailing and timidly reached up to touch his cheek. Her hands were warm while his had gone icy, and she showed him where to find her.

"I understand," he told her when he had the image fixed in his mind. He met her eyes, waiting to see the belief there before he gingerly grasped the birdlike bones of her wrists and drew her arms around his neck. "We're coming for you, I promise."

He concentrated with all his power on sharing with her that memory of the relief of being found, just like they would find her, and swung them back into their rightful places with another strange twist. She gave him one more grave look, both frightened and hopeful, and scampered into the trees toward the meager comfort of her hiding place.

Sam was once more in whatever psychic antechamber he'd created. Studiously not looking at the walls around him, he deliberated what to do with the door: he wanted to lock it and will it out of existence, but knew there was a chance he'd need to seek her out again. He comprised by closing it all but a crack.

"_Sammy!_" Dean called, and Sam turned around and snapped back into full physicality. He gasped, yanking his hands away from the ones folded around them, and Dean slid back so fast that he almost fell over. "Sam? You all right?"

"Yeah," Sam lied, leaning back and closing his eyes against the new onslaught of dizziness. His cheeks were wet again. "I need a minute."

Dean backed away to what should have been a safe distance. Right now, the length of the whole picnic area probably wouldn't have been enough of a buffer. "She didn't know how to tell me where to find her. Could she show you?"

"Yeah. Enough, at least." Sam opened his eyes again; to his relief, the scenery stayed still around him. "She's on the bank of a little river. Just drive into the park until we hit it, and then follow it upstream."

Dean swept their things haphazardly from the picnic table. "We're gone."

Sam made it halfway up before the wave of vertigo knocked him back on his ass.

"Fuck, Sammy." Dean lunged for him.

Sam held up his hand to arrest the motion, dropped it back down when he realized how violently it was trembling. "Just give me a minute," he repeated.

Dean's energies were screaming 'move _now_,' but he simply clenched his jaw, nodded, and stepped back. Sam did the slow, careful breathing again and tried without an iota of success to barricade himself off from the waves of emotion rolling off his brother. Fending off another offer of help, he gritted his teeth and staggered up.

Sam kept his distance as they walked back to the parking lot, but when they got to the car, there was no avoiding it. "Dean, could you, uh..." he started as Dean unlocked his door.

"What, Sammy?" Dean's voice shook. Sam could only remember seeing him like this once or twice in his life.

"Could you not be so mad?"

Dean yanked the driver's side door open. "Honestly, Sam? No." He braced his hands against the car anyway and breathed deep before clambering in. "Did you see what happened to her? Feel it?"

"No."

Dean jammed the key into the ignition and twisted it so hard Sam was afraid he'd snap the metal. "Good."

They peeled out of the lot into the park. Dean stared stone-faced ahead of them and drove too fast; Sam watched for a promising road and tried not to cower.

Dean looked apologetic and utterly helpless to change his mood. "She'll be okay until we get there, right?" he asked after a few minutes. "I mean, I know she's scared, but it's not like there's anything there that will actually hurt her."

"No. She'll be all right until we find her." Sam pointed as they passed an intersection. "Here, try here."

Dean spun the wheel into too tight a turn and they fishtailed around, making Sam's queasy stomach flip. His guess was right—the river came into view. Dean swung them onto the road running next to it.

"Now what?"

"She can see a footbridge way off downstream—she doesn't know how far. We'll start there and hike up until we find her."

Dean was gripping the wheel tightly enough to leave dents. "You going to make it?"

"I have to. Don't worry about me."

Dean looked unconvinced, but didn't pursue it. "We've got about an hour of sun left," he said, slamming down the accelerator. "She's not going to hide from us, is she?"

"I'll recognize the spot when I see it. Slow down a little, okay?" Racing daylight wouldn't help if they overshot their destination.

Dean decelerated enough that Sam would be able to blink without missing his landmark, but he didn't look happy about it. "She wouldn't tell me her name," he said after a pause.

"What did she say?" Sam stared out the windshield, as if he could block out the psychic memory burned into his brain by fixating hard enough on the scenery in front of him.

"She lives in a big white house alone with her daddy because her mommy went to heaven," Dean recited flatly. "She's six years old. She's afraid of the dark."

Sam breathed through his nose and thought very, very hard about not throwing up until they got out of the car. The banks of the river were rising into bluffs—they had to be getting close.

"She wanted to know if I could take her away from her daddy like I took you away from yours," Dean finished, shooting him a sidelong glance with an expression that was two parts inquiry and one part betrayal.

"I showed her that time at the mall," Sam explained, "because I was scared and lost too, and I got found. But Dad was pretty mad, remember, and she couldn't see past that. So I focused on you taking me away to wherever it was we went—can't remember now." He kept thinking, 'fish,' which wasn't calming his sanity fears any, and now wasn't the time to revisit them. "I just know I wasn't scared anymore."

"You were happy as a clam. Forgot all about it in five minutes." More softly, Dean added, "She's not lost in a mall, Sam."

"I know. God, I know." The temperature plummeted just as the bridge the child had shown Sam came into view. "There!" he pointed, and grabbed at the door handle.

Dean swerved the car into the little turnout and skidded into the parking spot nearest to the bridge. There was no one else in the lot. With a fresh shockwave of fury, he popped the trunk release and shoved his door open with enough force to make the springs bounce it back.

"Let's haul ass."

Sam pulled himself together and followed him to the rear of the car. Dean threw him a flashlight, stuffed a water bottle and blanket into a duffel bag, and leaned halfway into the trunk to root around for something. "Where's your stash of those hippie California granola bars?"

"All the way in back. Far left corner," Sam told him distractedly, grabbing a pair of work gloves. He made a mental note to watch for a clearing as they went in, and reached for the shovels.

Dean locked a hand around his wrist, hard enough to bruise. "What are you doing with those?"

"I don't want to burn her, she's not malevolent—Jesus, Dean!" Sam doubled over.

Dean snatched his hand away, threw down the duffel, and stormed off.

Sam followed his brother out to the footbridge, where he was facing away, body rigid. Sam waited until he turned halfway around, and then took a step forward. Dean didn't give him the look that meant, 'Keep your freakish psychic antenna out of my broadcast area,' so Sam walked up to him and sat back against the handrail.

"I'm sorry, man. I thought you understood."

Dean shook his head once, lips compressed. He was radiating the qualities that made him the hunter Sam would never be: leashed bloodlust and a cold killer's instincts. "We're going to take care of her," he said with deadly calm. "And then we're going to find him, and we're going to put him in the ground. Understand?"

Sam braced himself. "We can't."

Dean slammed his open palms down on the wooden ledge Sam was sitting against, making the whole railing vibrate. It was barely noticeable against the simultaneous, inadvertent psychic concussion.

"Don't you give me that! You don't want to be a part of it, that's fine. But as God is my witness, Sam, I'm going to do it. The son of a bitch is going to be lucky if I don't fucking bury him alive."

"Dean." Sam waited for his brother to meet his eyes. "It's too late," he said gently.

Dean looked blank for a few seconds, and then comprehension struck. "How long?" he whispered. Sam hesitated, and Dean pushed, "Tell me, Sammy."

"The park wasn't here at all, that's why she was so confused about how to get here, and she remembers the main road as a stagecoach route. From her clothes, it's been at least a hundred years. Dean…," he said helplessly as the anguish hit.

Dean shook his head, swallowed hard, and moved a few steps away. "You're supposed to be _premonition_ boy, Sam. Future boy. People we can help."

"We are going to help her."

"Whatever, Haley Joel." Dean planted his elbows on the bridge's wooden railing and dropped his head into his hands. Sam waited, trying not to shiver in the cold, until Dean cleared his throat and looked up. "You sure this is the right place?"

"I'm sure." The ambient temperature—ambient to him, at least—was all the confirmation Sam needed, but he cast a quick look over his shoulder toward the grim landscape behind him anyway. He wondered if the water looked as black and the trees as skeletal to Dean as they did to him. "What happened to her?"

Dean ignored the question. "She let me hold"—he jerked his head towards where Sam was holding the railing—"those bony paws. They were freezing. Shoulda guessed then."

"Her hands were warm when she came back through," Sam told him.

Dean shrugged. After a few moments of silence, he bent down and picked up a handful of stones. "Why are you seeing dead people anyway?" he asked as he lined them up neatly along the railing. "Do you think she was one of…?" He nodded toward Sam again.

"One of whatever I am? I don't think so." Sam picked his words carefully. "I'm not sure the nightmare was going to be about her at all. It might have been random chance that she was here when it started, and she wandered in or got swept up with it."

"Through the door?"

"No, I made the door. It's hard to verbalize. You know, a psychic thing," Sam deflected.

To his relief, Dean let it drop. He picked up his first stone and narrowed his eyes as he selected a target from a small logjam upstream, splitting his focus enough that the continuing buzz of his anger was no longer wreaking havoc with Sam's synapses.

"Do you remember how we found you in the mall?" he asked.

Sam shoved his freezing bony paws into his pockets. "I started screaming bloody murder and someone found me, right?"

"Other way around." Dean threw the rock; the _thunk_ it made when it hit its mark was clearly audible over the rushing waters. "A mall cop saw you and tried to take you to kiddy lost-and-found. You started howling that you had to stay where you were so Daddy or Dean could find you."

Sam waited.

"He was yelling at her." Dean flung the next stone with more force. "Holding on to her, shaking her. She got away and ran into the woods."

Sick realization sank in. "No." _She'd been killed there, her body had been dumped there, but not that._ No one was that evil. "No," Sam said again.

"He left her there, Sammy." Dean's voice cracked. "The bastard just fucking _left_ her there."

"God." Sam reined in the shivers threatening to wrack his body as the dark cloud around him coalesced into the child's abandonment and horror, and studied the set of his brother's jaw. "There's something more, isn't there?" he asked.

Dean nodded stiffly, the knuckles of his left hand white as he gripped the railing with impotent rage and grief and empathetic fear. Sam mentally ran over what he'd sensed from the girl when he'd coaxed her to them. It mattered, he realized, that she was frightened of Dean until she saw him as a sturdy ten-year-old holding Sam's hand as he skipped along and blithely jabbered away; there was a reason she wouldn't tell them her name. She'd never had anyone big and strong to protect her; she'd never known anything but fear at a deep booming voice calling for her.

"She was afraid of men," Sam guessed.

"Yeah." Another rock, another hit. "So afraid that when someone came looking for her, she hid."

"Jesus Christ." The air was now as frigid as it had been in the pocket in space and time where the child dwelt. Sam lost the struggle not to shake.

Dean looked at him sharply "Is she here?"

"I'm there. We're there. Don't you...can't you feel _anything_?" Sam heard the note of desperation rising in his voice. He knew that the one crumb of good fortune in all of this was that the supernatural curse had struck him instead of his brother, because Dean couldn't have handled it—Dean could bear anything, except weakness. Just once, though, Sam wanted some confirmation that it wasn't all in his head.

"No." Dean started to strip off his jacket.

"It won't help." Nothing would help until they got away from that place; the cold would remain even after they freed the ghost. It would endure as long as the forest lasted, as long as the fear-fed leaves fell and decayed and nourished the next year's buds.

Dean jerked his head. "Scoot your scrawny ass over here."

Sam scooted, turning to face the river. He ventured a glance at the ominous gloom that grew ever thicker upstream, and quickly looked down at the water. Dean stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, put one of Sam's hands on top of the other on the railing, and plunked one of his own over them.

"Dude, I can feel…" Sam warned, jumping at the sudden jolt of Dean-ness.

"I know. It's okay." Dean picked up another rock. Three more remained lined up on the railing. He'd finish them off and be ready to go—that was the goal he'd set himself, and he'd accomplish it. Sam just had to wait it out.

He focused on the warmth of Dean's hand sinking into his, and the underlying, soothing hum of his protectiveness. Protectiveness for the nameless girl, for Sam—it didn't matter, he'd take what he could get. God. Ten more minutes and he'd be wanting to hold his big brother's hand all the way out to the girl's hiding place. How a child's spirit had survived so long without descending into malevolence or the ghostly equivalent of madness was beyond him.

"I wouldn't have sent you out into the land of the dead if I'd known," Dean said gruffly, pitching out the stone.

"Yeah, and then no one ever would have found her. Job's got risks, right? This is just a different kind of risk." Sam didn't need to see Dean's face to know that he'd lifted a skeptical eyebrow. He tried to keep his voice steady, as if he believed his own words. "It's okay—it didn't make it any worse."

_Shit._

Dean snapped his head around. "Didn't make what worse?"

Sam turned back to the rushing waters, cursing his stupid post-attack loose lips. This wasn't the time for this conversation, not with Dean tearing himself up for not saving a child who'd died nearly a century before he was born.

"You saw something in the room with the door, didn't you?" his brother said slowly. "Look at me, Sam. What did you see?"

Sam looked. He was leaning far enough forward that he had to tilt his head up to meet Dean's eyes, which even now felt normal—the weirdest day of Sam's youth was the day he realized he was taller than his big brother. "The visions…," he began, and trailed off.

"What about the visions?" Dean asked steadily.

_Bite the bullet, Sam_. "They're making cracks in my psyche to get it. That's what the headaches are."

Dean's eyes widened and scanned rapidly over Sam's face, but he let Sam keep talking.

"I think the dizzy spells are my brain, my physical brain, going into shock while the cracks heal." Sam tried to make it sound as innocuous as physical wound healing. "The empathic shit isn't an antenna going up—it's energies, or whatever, getting through the open spaces until they close up again. I'm still picking things up now because I left the door open a little."

"Fuck, Sammy."

"Yeah." Dean's mounting anxiety was amplifying Sam's own, but he still felt safer than he would have without the connection. He bit his lip, wanting to hold back his next words and knowing they were coming out anyway. "This is, uh…this is really scaring me."

Dean swallowed, shaking his head. "No," he said. He took a deep breath, pulling himself together, and fell back on their old standby. "No. We'll deal with it. I'm not going to let anything happen to you."

"You can't promise that." Sam ruthlessly crushed the spark of resentment at their father for _doing_ that to Dean, because that was one conversation they were never going to have. "God, Dean, I need you _not_ to promise that."

A flash of hurt rippled through the firm warmth of Dean's presence, but he didn't pull his hand away. "Then what do you need, Sammy?"

"I need…" Sam walked cautiously; even this was ground Dean didn't want to cover. "I need to be the man you raised me to be."

Dean studied his face for another moment and rubbed his hand over his mouth. "Okay," he said. "Okay, Sam. I get that."

"Okay." Sam ventured another glance up the river, noting the lengthening position of the shadows. The sun was going down, and they'd have a hell of a time finding her in the dark.

Dean tossed out another rock. "We're not leaving her alone out there," he said suddenly. "We passed a cemetery about an hour back, remember? We're going to bury her in holy ground."

"That's a good idea." The detached, professional part of Sam's mind ran over how best to move her. "Oh, God," he said when he caught himself.

"What?"

"I didn't think about what we're going to find." Sam had banished more malevolent ghosts than he could remember, and helped more than one lost soul find peace, but even as he'd automatically pulled the shovels out of the trunk, he'd seen _her_ in his mind, not a small heap of fragile bones crumbling in a niche of a cave. "I was picturing her. She didn't look like a ghost."

"No, she didn't." Dean's lips tightened, and Sam belatedly realized what frightened, motherless child his brother had actually seen. Jesus. Did Dean have any buttons left that this job hadn't pushed?

"She was cute," Sam told him.

Dean glanced at him sideways. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Light brown hair, blue eyes,"—wide and terrified—"heart-shaped little face, freckles across her nose. Pretty. She wasn't me, Dean."

"You never were all that cute," Dean conceded, but the response was half-hearted, rote.

"And you couldn't have protected her," Sam went on doggedly. "You didn't let her down."

"You're psychic, Sam, not a psychologist." Dean hefted the second-to-last stone. "We're not talking about my feelings."

"I'm talking about hers." In an old game, Sam pointed out a target; Dean snorted and hit it dead-on. "I know you're hurting, man, but for her, this is nothing but good, see? She's been out here alone for so long, and now somebody found her, somebody held her hand, and somebody who cares about her is going to lay her to rest. That's all that matters."

Dean kept silent for a long moment, breathing in a controlled, steady rhythm. "Yeah," he said, the despair in his aura lifting a bit. "Okay, yeah."

One more rock left. Sam watched a stick circling in an eddy near the bank and sifted through the memories he'd shown the girl. His hand involuntarily twitched under Dean's.

"What?"

"I was thinking of what I showed her." Sam glanced over at his brother as he lifted the final stone. "Dad hugged me when he found me at the mall, right? Picked me up?"

"Yeah, sure. He had to pass you off to me when I got there because he couldn't talk to the cop with you hiccupping and half-strangling him like a snot-nosed little monkey." Dean's lips quirked. "I took you to see the goldfish in the fountain. That's what you were looking for when you wandered off."

"Oh. Right." The stick Sam had been watching broke out of the eddy and bobbed into the white froth of the rapids. "Did you catch hell for losing me?"

"Nah. All six-year-olds get lost in the mall, it's a universal constant. Besides, he was the one watching you before you slithered away." Dean hurled the last rock into the river, no target, just sending it as far as it would go. "You bit the cop, by the way. Dad was kind of proud of that."

He let go of Sam's hand and shoved away from the railing. "It's almost sundown. We should get moving."

"Be right there," Sam told him without looking up. "Just let me get oriented."

Dean's boots crunched away in the gravel, and then paused. "Sammy, there's nothing that could hurt you on the other side of the door, right?"

"I don't think so. Why?"

"Look, man, I don't want you to take any chances." Dean took a step back toward him. "But if it's not dangerous, could you maybe let her back in? Just for a minute. I want to, you know..."

Sam nodded his comprehension as the branch washed under the bridge.

The memories he'd shown the child were chipped—they'd broken under the strain of the psychic twists when they'd switched places. The moment when his father must have scooped him up, hugging and scolding him and brushing away his tears, was missing, along with the recollection of Dad swinging him back down to put him into the equal safety of Dean's guardianship. They were just gone, ground away like pebbles caught between shifting tectonic plates.

"Sam?"

"Yeah." He pressed his freezing palms against his temples again. There were chips in his psyche, there were chips in _him_, and the rough plaster over the cracks in the walls didn't look as if it would hold...

...and the sun was setting, and somewhere up the river was a scared little girl, lost in the woods for a hundred years, whose father had never kissed her goodnight.

"Yeah." Sam looked up to face the shadows. "Yeah, Dean. Sure."


End file.
